BART said changes made after 2019 power outage would prevent future incidents. Why it happened again
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- While it's challenging for most of us to remember anything pre-pandemic, the images at BART stations around the Bay Area Friday may have jogged your memory.
An outage back in 2019 led to transit changes, including upgrading the computer hardware and network infrastructure as well as creating a redundant network disaster recovery center to protect service in the event of a network failure.
This is what BART Board of Directors Bevan Dufty said at the time, "We can be confident and say to our riders that this will not happen again because of the upgrades that we've made."
More than 6 years later, it did happen again, though BART officials say for a different reason than in 2019.
"Some network devices that were not properly communicating with one another .. this problem area was part of our redundant system," said Alicia Trost, BART Chief Communications Officer.
Live updates: BART says service restored following systemwide outage
Meaning, it was the backup system that had the communication issue, making one wonder, did the backup need a backup?
"We were on the main system but it was an issue with the redundant system that was causing a problem," said Trost.
"Clearly, we'll need to do a deeper dive into what exactly was happening and so why wasn't there even more redundancy in place," she continued.
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Debora Allen was on the Bart Board of Directors from 2016 to 2024.
"What came to mind for me this morning is BART isn't getting it done fast enough," said Allen.
MORE: All BART service resumes after systemwide shutdown causes commuting nightmare
BART says it will investigate more in the coming days to keep this from happening again.
A system upgrade has been in the works. BART officials told ABC7's Melanie Woodrow, it's a 10 year project.
